One of Our Thursdays Is Missing - Jasper Fforde [88]
Flanker looked at me, then at the heavies, then out the window. He said nothing for perhaps thirty seconds, but I knew he was going to make a move. The trouble was, so did the heavies. Flanker reached for his gun, but no sooner had he grasped the butt than he suddenly stopped, his eyes rolled upwards into his head, and he collapsed without a noise. It was as though he’d been switched off. The Goliath heavy showed me a small remote with a single button on it.
“Useful little gadget,” he said. “All our enemies should have one. Boris? Get rid of him and then fetch Miss Next a cup of tea.”
The synthetic Flanker was unceremoniously dragged from the compartment by Boris, and the first heavy came to sit in Flanker’s old place.
“An excellent move,” he said with the air of authority, “to pit one of your foes against another. Worthy of the real Thursday. Now, where is she?”
“I’m her,” I said, suddenly realizing that while this whole Goliath adventure was kind of amusing, it wasn’t helping me find out where Thursday had actually gone. The sum total of my knowledge was that she’d been gone a month, was not dead, and had said that Lyell was boring. Goliath didn’t have her, so I was wasting my time here. I needed to get back to Swindon.
“Are you a day player as well?” I asked.
“No,” said the man, “I’m real. I check every morning. I know better than most that Goliath can’t be trusted. Now, where are you from and where’s Thursday?”
“I’m her. You don’t need to look any further.”
“You’re not her,” he said, “because you don’t recognize me. It surprised me at first, which was why I had to make sure you weren’t one of ours gone rogue. They do that sometimes. Despite our best attempts to create synthetics with little or no emotions, empathy tends to invade the mind like a virus. It’s most troublesome. Flanker would have killed you this morning if I’d told him to, and by the afternoon he dies trying to protect you. It’s just too bad. Now, where’s Thursday?”
Finally I figured it out. The one person at Goliath who had more reason to hate me than any other.
“You’re Jack Schitt, aren’t you?”
He stared at me for a moment, and smiled.
“By all that’s great and greedy,” he said, staring at me in wonder, “what a coup. You’re the written one, aren’t you?”
“No.”
But he knew I was lying. Unwittingly, I had revealed everything. Jack Schitt wasn’t his real name—it was his name in the series. I didn’t know what his real name was, but he would certainly have known his fictional counterpart. He pulled the phone off the hook and punched a few buttons.
“It’s me. Listen carefully: It’s not Thursday, it’s the written Thursday. . . . Yes, I’m positive. She could melt back any second, so we need to get her Blue Fairyed the second we’re on Goliath soil. . . . I don’t care what it takes. If she’s not real by teatime, heads will roll. And no, I’m not talking figuratively.”
He hung up the phone and stared at me with a soft, triumphal grin. “When are you due back?”
I stared at him, a feeling of genuine fear starting to fill me. My actions so far had been based on the certainty that I would return. The idea of staying here forever was not in the game plan.
“What happened to the Austen Rover, Next?”
“The what?”
“The Austen Rover. Our experimental transfictional tour bus. The real Thursday traveled with it on its inaugural flight and never returned. Where is it?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, and besides, the Blue Fairy is fictional and lives inside Pinocchio. She doesn’t do any actualizing these days. The Council of Genres forbade it.”
“Better and better,” he said, waving away the second heavy, who had returned with my tea, and closing the compartment door. “So you are from the BookWorld. And I was bluffing—we don’t have a Blue Fairy. But we have the next best thing: a green fairy.”
“I’ve never heard of the Green Fairy.”
“It’s a concoction of our own. It’s not so much a fairy—more like a magnetic containment facility designed to keep fictional characters from crossing back. I understand that the